A Study of Steinbeck
COSMAN, MAX
A Study of Steinbeck The Wide World of John Steinbeck. By Peter Lisca. Rutgers. 326 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," "Nation" "Herald Tribune Book Review" PETER...
...This, in an age of criticism and apropos of a major living novelist, is really "a curious situation," to use Lisca's phrase...
...were not intended to apotheosize natural man nor entertain literary slummers...
...He has insight...
...Like Geoffrey Wagner's Wyndham Lewis, C. R. Sanders's Lytton Strachey or Elizabeth Sprigge's Gertrude Stein, it is an examination of a distinctive figure in literature...
...But unequivocal as he is about Steinbeck's decline after 1947, he by no means takes the position, as Alfred Kazin recently has, that works from The Moon Is Down to East of Eden represent a Steinbeckian debacle...
...And he is not averse to admitting influences...
...Note nevertheless should be taken of Lisca's subconscious fear that Steinbeck's contribution to letters is finished...
...Lisca's treatment is adequate...
...Books like In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men, he points out...
...The Bible is in it and Dos Passos's Newsreel, as well as folk idiom, Walt Whitman, perhaps Carl Sandburg of The People, Yes and, without doubt...
...Even if Steinbeck should not succeed again in writing major literature," he writes, "the 16 volumes of fiction he has thus far published make up a substantial body of work which, despite unevenness of texture, remains viable and suggests an enduring value...
...The whole structure of narrative and manner of narrative, continues Lisca...
...Attention in the past, it would seem, went to Steinbeck's "social message" and left his "craftsmanship" relatively unexplored—a situation which the present analysis of technique and content is intended to correct...
...Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," "Nation" "Herald Tribune Book Review" PETER LISCA'S BOOK is typical of the critical studies appearing these days...
...When a man speaks so forthrightly, one should listen...
...The Grapes of Wrath goes beyond emotional compulsion and social protest to become America's premier work in forging and making instrumental many prose styles...
...Steinbeck's disengagement from an initially "arty" technique owed much, he demonstrates, to an acceptance of Ernest Hemingway's ideals on writing "truly," without "tricks," and without "cheating...
...He makes us respect Steinbeck's background in reading and its effectuation in literary parallels, as, for instance...
...Pare Lorentz of The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains...
...The Wide World of John Steinbeck has this virtue to start with: It is the only full-length study of its subject at present...
...Tortilla Flat with its basis in the Morte d'Arthur...
...this is indeed a consummation devoutlv to be wished for...
...He knows that Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, was a fourth attempt, that for all its effort it is no more than a young writer's highfalutin' hero tricked out in archaisms, pathetic fallacies and motion-picture scenes...
...If it differs, it is not in the vast amount of material gone over, but in the choice of a man still alive, still able to add to his canon...
...is supported by "a continuum of symbols and symbolic actions...
...In this connection, as Lisca takes pains to show...
...Though there is significance in The Forgotten Village and the Sea of Cortez which follow next in the Steinbeck line-up—the latter book, indeed, sums up such concepts of Steinbeck's as non-teleological thinking, ecology, the possible individuality of a group-animal, survival of the fittest, group psyche-memory and the mystic unity of life—Lisca reveals his awareness of a come-down in Steinbeck's creative power...
...Every part of it, he says strongly, is evidence of a surrender of "artistic integrity...
...Yet in making the point that with the death of Edward F. Ricketts, the marine biologist on whom so much is modeled, Steinbeck lost an "ideal audience" and "an artistic conscience," he gives himself a chance to reflect harshly on opuses like Sweet Thursday and The Short Reign of Pippin IV, but most of all on Steinbeck's "third-rate" journalism...
...Steinbeck's attempt was ever to explore philosophic-moral systems, and it is this that explains his interest in strikers and drifters or in paisanos and Mexican villagers...
...For a man who has produced an epic for America and furnished it with many notable fictions in addition...
...Referring to such early stories as "The Chrysanthemums" and "Vigilante," Lisca makes this pious prognostication: "If Steinbeck can recapture the concentration and discipline with which he handled character in these short stories twenty-some years ago, and if he can subject this aspect of his art to a vital though different informing view of life, then it is quite possible that he will once more resume writing on the level of major fiction...
Vol. 42 • January 1959 • No. 4
